Sugar Cane Punts on the River Arun Water-Meadows

About this work:

This work explores the relationship between the water-meadow systems of Hampshire and Sussex specifically and their relationship with the impolderment and irrigation systems of Guyana. Both systems involve a controlled manipulation of water flow for irrigation and agricultural improvement, and both have left long-lasting geometric scars on the landscape. The water-meadows of England were often based on the necessary precondition of (18th and 19th century) Enclosure: a process which involved the mass expropriation and privatisation of land and saw the disempowerment and dislocation of pre-capitalist rural workers, it was a process of primitive accumulation which allowed for the creation of an industrial proletariat divorced from any means of production. The system of Guyanese impolderment was based on the prerequisite of an even more dangerous productive social relation of exploitation: that of slavery. Slavery was also a process of primitive accumulation but one which is more often forgotten in the bloody history of capitalist primitive accumulation. Capitalism would not have flourished as a world system were it not for this primitive accumulation. In depicting Guyanese sugar punts on the River Arun water-meadows, this work seeks to situate a Guyanese landscape within a British one, to interrupt the exclusivising sublimation and disrupt the narrative of bland, pastoral ahistoricism associated with the English water-meadow landscape. The burning of one of the sugar punts references the burning of sugar cane during the Guyanese Berbice Slave Uprising of 1763 and the halting and stagnation of crop movement during the Guyanese strikes and riots of 1905, and in so doing, the work seeks to act as a re-imagining of revolutionary horizons, a call for anti-imperialistic international, intertemporal cross-geographical proletarian solidarity.